Tiger Airlines on the back foot in Australia

It comes as no surprise to me that Tiger Airlines is on the back foot with respect to its ambitious expansion plans. The marketing side of the airline is bad enough without even looking at other issues. The airline has a number of issues:

1. Poor capacity to allow seamless travel through Singapore with a hopeless booking system

2. Misleading promotional campaigns which leave prospective customers snubbing their emails

In this respect, Jetstar has the right idea, though they have hopeless customer service. The good news is that Jetstar is showing signs of improving things. Air Asia X is another airline which is making the same mistake on marketing; though it probably has a lower cost operation given that KL is likely to be a lower cost hub. It is at an earlier stage in its expansion plans. It made the sensible decision to service the Christchurch market, which previously had no low-cost offerings to Asia. KL is a great hub because you can get a cheap hotel there for commuters.

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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

Extortion in the Australian building trade

Years ago I was in a group of Australians studying the philosophy of Ayn Rand. We would get together every Sunday and listen to taped lecture courses. These courses were very good. You can probably still get them from the Ayn Rand Institute.

One guy who turned up to one of the club meetings was a previously successful demolisher in the building trade. The guy was impressive in several respects. He was a big fellow with a great deal of confidence and he just radiated charisma. Sadly, he was not terribly intellectual. He was however interested in taking some political action.

He often talked about how he was making a lot of money in the building trade; that he employed a lot of people, until he was forced out of the business, and faced a union black-ban. The guy's name was John Companion. He shot himself in the head as a result of the stress, family breakdown that resulted from these events. He impressed a lot of people; and I think if he had the greater intellect to develop or advance a better strategy, he would have had a very different life. He went off the rails at this time. The signs of imminent suicide was the decision to change his name to 'John Galt' - the character in the best-selling fictional novel by Ayn Rand 'Atlas Shrugged'. Of course the book was recently made into a movie. The trailer is on YouTube.

All this of course is important because at the moment there is a big trial attracting a lot of attention in Australia between the unions and Multiplex, the construction company. The trial is raising news of kickbacks and so forth. There were people around John who could say a great deal in this trial I suspect.

Anyway, the fact that such extortion can go on for the 2 decades that I have known about it; the fact that people feel compelled to take their lives rather than seek justice, I think it says something, not just about the quality of our society, but the institutions which drive it. The legacy of this of course will not be justice. Justice is never done. It is always some half-measure. The half-measure arises from the huge cost of taking action, the people lost in the process, the settlements out of court, the lack of accountability, the incidental issues which seem to undermine compelling evidence. The problem of course is the nature of our government.

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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com